Activate a BeOS partition after installing Windows

After installing/upgrading Windows, you’ll lose bootman. To get back into BeOS, you typically need a BeOS CD or boot floppy (once booted, just re-run “bootman”). If you don’t have a CD or boot floppy, this technique will get you back in business.

Start the computer in MS-DOS mode

Power on computer

Press F8 several times after the memory count.

Choose “Command Prompt Only”

Run FDISK and set active partition to BeOS partition

C:/> FDISK

Choose Set active partition

Set your BeOS partition as the active partition

Restart the computer (and you will enter BeOS)

Run bootman

Launch a Terminal

$ bootman

That’s it!

You can use this trick on most OSes that can set other partitions as active. You can use this technique from DOS 2.x on. I also believe you can use this method with WinNT, OS/2, and linux with their versions of fdisk.